Life lived according to love
The last stanza of the poem I posted on Friday was a rather unintentional segue into this one (though I did think along these lines when I posted it).
Yesterday at my church we had a women’s teaching morning from Steph Menear on Identity, which was very encouraging and helpful. It’s easy to say we know our identity is in Christ, but we need to ask ourselves occasionally are we living like that’s true. So we started with reminders of the truth: that we are made in the image of God, yet that image is distorted in us, but we have a humble dignity that still remains; that we are a new creation in Christ and the gospel changes the way God sees us and the way we see ourselves; and how the gospel reorients us to live for Jesus and love like Jesus. Then we had some discussion question time and morning tea before moving on to the application. This was really useful material on how we might go about moving “Christian” to the bottom layer of our identity and warm ourselves at the fire of our identity in Christ (with some credit to Tim Keller for these ideas). Then we looked at what this means in how we respond to praise and criticism and how we function in relationships.
See, part of the sadness of the last stanza in that poem is that the women in it, if they have been sitting in church or soaking up the gospel for any length of time, should know that they are loved – that God loves them and delights in them with a love that’s all surpassing. And when our identity is found there, “a sense of life lived according to love” does then become the “difference they could make by loving others”, rather than a craving to be loved or an ache for "all they might have done had they been loved". This is how the gospel reorients us to love like Jesus.
Anyway, this is my half-baked, hurried Sunday morning post (plus this could be one very long post if I started elaborating), but yesterday we also had a book review of the book Mirror Mirror by Graham Beynon, which is apparently an excellent book that covers (at least some of) this material. So I have added it to my Book Depository wish list (where you can get it for $10).